


One Road

by Merit



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 22:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/pseuds/Merit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenny had been seeing demons for a long time now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Road

The dirt was cold and the gravel rough against her cheek when Jenny woke up. She blinked twice as a car whizzed past, her hair flying in the wind. In the window there was a figure, pale and horned, and he seemed to roar for a moment before the car was gone. Jenny took a deep breath.

“Abby!” She exclaimed, looking around the roadside for her sister. Abby wasn’t far and she quickly crawled over. “Abby, wake up, wake up. I saw something again. It was in the car, but it wasn’t and I – ”

Her sister grabbed her hand and shook a little. “What was it?”

“A monster,” Jenny said firmly. “We have to tell everyone. It won’t be safe anymore,” and when the words came out of her mouth, half without her permission as if another force was guiding her, Jenny realised it was true.

There were evil forces in Sleepy Hollow.

-

The police hadn’t believed them, no matter how much Jenny insisted. “How else did I end up by the road?” And the police officers exchanged looks, sly and mean, then turned to her with little mocking smiles on their lips.

Abby grew quieter and quieter.

The police officers had a chat with their mother about controlling her daughters. Their mother’s lips pursed and grew thinner and thinner as the police mentioned drugs, alcohol, boys, lying teenagers, wasting police resources, don’t they sound crazy? until she shot a harsh glare at her daughters.

“I understand,” she said coolly, drawing herself to her full height. “Come, girls,” she called imperiously.

It hurt more that their mother didn’t believe them.

-

School was bad. Some smart aleck reporter had got a hold of the story and it had been splashed across the morning newspaper.

“You do realise it isn’t Halloween yet, right?”

“They’re just seeking attention.”

“Like, ghosts don’t exist. You probably just saw a shadow.”

The teachers were cool and superior, which wasn’t totally new, but Jenny didn’t like the judgment that lurked in their eyes. It was the same judgment that had caused Jessie to drop out in her junior year after she got pregnant, the same judgment that had made Tom to give up on school when he didn’t get the help he needed when he had trouble with math.

“Who couldn’t ever believe such a story?”

“You know, those Mills sisters are crazy!”

“Crazy.”

-

Abbie hunkered down. Started talking back at teachers, started getting into fights with other students when they made fun of her. The teachers never took her side. And two months after they had been found on the side of the road, she started drinking. Four months and she took her first joint. It made it easier to ignore the taunts, the stares and the way her friends had disappeared like shadows from the sun.

And Jenny... she saw them still.

Not always the same monsters. But they were there, always there. Whispering malevolent thoughts in her ear till she screamed at them to stop, to go away and to leave her in peace.

They haunted her dreams, chasing her the entire night. Just before the day dawned they would grab her ankles, drag her down and devour her.

Jenny would wake up, covered in sweat and smeared with dirt. Jenny would stare at her arms, remembering how a demon had bitten off her hand and shudder.

Her mother would find her hours later, still huddling beneath the covers, shivering and shaking. There had been calls, from concerned neighbours, from interfering neighbours and from the police. Jenny had been seen running in the night, shrieking and yelling.

Jenny didn’t remember that. Her mother had sat on her bed, a strange look on her face. She patted Jenny’s shoulder and nodded.

“You haven’t been feeling well, have you?” The mother said, sounding so distant but Jenny latched on to the hope that mother did believe her.

“They there and no one believes me, but they’re making me look so crazy,” Jenny said. “Even Abbie is starting to doubt what we saw, but I know. I know something bad is coming.”

“Abbie’s a good girl,” her mother said, staring at her hands as if Jenny couldn’t remember how her mother had screamed at Abbie a few nights ago when Abbie had came home drunk.

“Mom,” Jenny whispered. Her mother still stared down, not daring to meet her eyes. “Look at me, please. I’m telling the truth. There are monsters out there. You have got to believe me.”

Her mother let out a soft cry, “Oh darling. I know. I know that’s what you believe but you’re just speaking nonsense. There’s no such thing as monsters.”

Jenny felt cold. In her mirror a monster laughed, cackling over her misfortune. “No!” She yelled, throwing a hairbrush at the mirror. It cracked and the laughing stopped but her mother was look at her with such horror. “No,” Jenny whispered.

-

They took her away.

Cold hands, white coats, blank eyes. They stared at her with patience, never believing anything she said.

Her mother visited when she could. The institution wasn’t too far away from Sleepy Hollow but her mother had work, had bills to pay, another daughter to raise, Abbie she could understand.

Jenny tried to say that that paying for the institution was a mistake, that she was perfectly sane, that what she saw was real. But her mother would listen, nod, then talk about how Mrs. O’Reilly’s cat had gone missing and the old lady was frantic about finding it. In the glass window, Jenny saw the cat, quite dead, displayed on a pentagram. A monster laughed in her ear, voice hoarse and breath hot.

It made her shudder. It made her mother pause. “Dear,” she said, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

Abbie visited less often. She seemed sullen and resentful and often smelled of booze. She’d talk about the stupid things she had gotten up with her girlfriends and boyfriends.

She always ignored where they were.

They released her, eventually.

-

Outside, the whispers were worse and the Mills sisters had hardly any reputation at all. Abbie seemed a bit obsessed that, in her own rebellious way. Jenny tried to appear sane, she got a job at Walmart and well, everyone was a little off there sometimes.

One night she was found babbling in the woods outside of Sleepy Hollow. She doesn’t remember. She had spoken of monsters, of being attacked. She had shown her wounds, smiled victoriously. How could they not believe her now?

She was sent back to the institution, this time on the state’s dime. Jenny was now considered a danger to herself.

They started her on the drugs. They sent her spinning, made her have fever dreams full of leering faces, long fingers and foul smelling horns. She felt so still, the world moved past her in an endless cycle of intuitions, drugs, being released and being sent back.

Then one day Abbie came in wearing a police officer’s uniform.

“What,” Jenny said.

“What?” Abbie said, tilting her head in confusion.

“You’re with the police,” Jenny mustered.

“Yes,” Abbie said, with all the enthusiasm of a convert. “Well. I had to a little,” she said, laughing. “I got caught by the sheriff, doing stupid things, but he’s giving me a second chance. And this time I won’t let anyone down.”

Jenny was silent.

-

It wasn’t until she was twenty or so that she realised that Nurse Wilson was working for the monsters. It wasn’t the rough way Wilson had treated her, some nurses could be like that and Jenny had learned to endure that. No, it was the way her teeth glinted in the light, how she almost had fangs at twilight. 

She must have noticed that Jenny was watching one day. Wilson leaned in, her breath pungent and blistering on Jenny’s neck and whispered that there would always be someone watching to make sure she never succeeded.

It took all of Jenny’s willpower not to punch Wilson in the face.

Jenny let out a deep breath. “I don’t care. I’m going to beat you anyway.”

Wilson had laughed a warped sound that echoed oddly in the room. Old Mrs Chang turned her half blind eyes Jenny’s way. Wilson then swept out of the room, her shadow oddly malformed, twisting in the half light.

“She means it, you know,” Mrs Chang whispered. Cancer had taken most of her voice. “You aren’t the first. You might be the last though.”

“If that is the case, I can’t fail,” Jenny said.

-

In the autumn she was released again. Jenny was waiting for outside. A stiff smile on her face, Jenny hardly recognised her sister now. “You can stay at my place,” she offered, as if she and the institution hadn’t come to an agreement.

Her sister was gone for long hours so Jenny had plenty of time to train and prepare. As the days shortened, as the shadows lingered long past when they should have, Sleepy Hollow grew nastier. She saw the monsters directly in the town that seemed blind against her reality. 

She was able to defeat most of them without her sister even being aware that she was outside of the house.

It was the shape shifting demon that got her though. They were tricky creatures and Jenny had been drawn too far away from the forest. 

She had raced after the monster, hardly even noticing that they had left the woods, intent on following the whooping calls. Jenny had leapt over a fence and punched the demon directly in the face.

Instead of a demon, a young man stared at her. Red human blood trickled out of his mouth as he murmured, “Game over.”

Jenny raised her head. She was surrounded by dozens of children.

“Oh god, she’s crazy still,” a woman gasped. Jenny focused on her, one of her former classmates. A teacher now by the look of it.

The demon had risen, muttering that a lady had just started chasing him in the woods.

The police had been called. Jenny had never seen Abbie so disappointed, as she was led out of the school, the whispers of crazy and mad seemed to hurt Abbie more.

“It is probably best you go back,” Abbie said, not looking Jenny in the eyes.

-

In and out, in and out. The drugs messed with her still. They made her forget her mission. 

On a sunny day they were sometimes allowed a walk on the grounds. In the clear air, close by the woods, Jenny could see the monsters creeping in the dark. They kept close by, keeping watch on her.

She was doing well, Jenny was told. The doctors would smile encouraging at her. Paternal, patronising hands would clap her on her shoulder. Told her to be a good girl and take her pills.

Outside she nodded, inside she barred her teeth and roared at them.

She would be quiet, would be nice and would play their games. There was something in the air. Something was coming.

Jenny would be ready for it.

-

“You will read this to me,” Mrs Chang said, shoving a newspaper into Jenny’s hands.

Jenny took it, smiling a little. Mrs Chang settled authoritatively in front of Jenny, her wrinkled hands clasped loosely around her cane. Jenny looked down and froze.

“What is it, girl?” Mrs Chang said, but there was something knowing in her voice.

“My sister is in the newspaper,” Jenny said quietly, tracing Abbie’s face with a finger. She looked older. Even in here Jenny had heard about the Sheriff’s death. She knew how much the man had meant to Abbie. 

“Oh?” Mrs Chang murmured, “But what about the man.”

“The man?” And there was a man there. Brown hair, white, tall. Though it wasn’t tough being taller than Abbie. There was something about his face that irritated her. He was someone important.

“They’re both outlined in gold, you know,” Mrs Chang said, her voice taking on a distant quality. “They’ll burn brightly.”

“Do you mind if I keep this?” Jenny asked.

Mrs Chang shook her head. “I have no use of it. Especially now. I’ll be dying in three days.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t be sad. This place is enough to drive anyone mad. But you’ve remained remarkably sane despite what they’ve tried to do you,” Mrs Chang took a deep breath. “I’ll be happy to be gone. I’ll be able to see my dear husband. He died nearly three decades ago. Killed by demons. They all thought I was mad too. Even my children,” she grew silent.

“I’ll kill them all,” Jenny said fiercely, quietly. Those sorts of remarks would not be deemed appropriate by her doctors.

“I’m sure you will, dear.”


End file.
